Mariam Thalos & Freedom as biting your arms and legs off.

Tarksi pointed out that any logically coherent discourse will feature 'primitive terms' or 'undefined terms' which are generally understood in an informal and everyday manner. It will also have 'definitions' of other notions based on those 'primitive terms'.

The primitive term used in Econ is Choice.

There is an Economic definition of Freedom- viz. that of having a given menu of choice- for which one might be prepared to pay a certain sum of money or undertake a certain set of obligations even if one does not want the things on the menu.

Thus, I currently have the freedom to relocate to any EU country. I don't want to do so but may still pay a certain sum of money, or undertake some more or less onerous set of tasks, so as to preserve this liberty. This may take the shape of campaigning for a second referendum on Brexit or it might involve applying for a German passport on the basis of my having been born in that country.

Is there a Philosophical definition of Freedom? If it can identify its own 'primitive notions', certainly there could be such a definition.

Let us take an example. The author is Prof. Mariam Thalos-

Human freedom resides primarily in exercise of that capacity that humans are singularly better at than any other species on earth: the capacity for judgement.

It seems judgement is the 'primitive notion' here. Freedom has to do with judging. What precisely?

And in particular: that special judgement in relation to Self that we call aspiration.

So Freedom is about what one judges one can and should aspire to. However, this is always a matter where others have relevant expert knowledge. The smart thing would be to outsource a lot of our judgments. It seems Philosophy is quite useless here because smart people already do this and get ahead whereas philosophers have been declining in prestige since the time of Aristotle.

Indeed, Socrates made it clear that this new thing he had invented and called 'Philosophy' was not inerrant Wisdom but a Love of Wisdom which could as easily impugn as affirm any Judgment on the basis of first principles alone. Thus Judgment can't be a primitive term for Philosophy as it is precisely that upon which no one can agree, even with himself, without ceasing to be a philosopher and becoming something else- a rhetorician, a putative legislator, a natural scientist, a psychologist, an economist or what have you. Collingwood, who died young, inculcated the notion- at least for those educated in England- that Philosophy was concerned with making 'distinctions without a difference'. Progress in the natural or social sciences might, however, give rise to a 'test case' such that the distinction corresponded to an actual difference- imperative or alethic as it may be- but, at precisely that moment, the subject ceased to be philosophical.


There was a time when 'Free Will vs Predestination/ Determinism' had a certain salience.
Prior to the Second World War, most academic philosophy in the West was the preserve of one or the other of the Churches. Clearly, if dogma requires an omniscient God, then Free Will is a scandal. The same is true for Marxist economic determinism. Can a person born into the bourgeoisie so change his consciousness that he need not be killed as a class enemy? If so, do Commissars have to be such evil little shits?

With the decline of both dogmatic Religion and the pretence that Marxist ideology mattered a damn, questions regarding freedom were dealt with in terms of Law, Economics or a type of Decision Theory which underlies both and which also is to be found in the work of professional philosophers.

It is foolish to pretend otherwise and thus write shite like this-

Are human beings free? Are we sources of at least some of our behaviour, not merely scenes in which the laws of nature unfold over time? And is our freedom, however we define it, truly different from anything that our nonhuman cousins enjoy?

The answer is yes, yes and yes. Evolutionary biology- which can be cast in game theoretic form- explains the whole thing. Some philosophers have actually contributed to elucidating how and why coevolved systems will create and constrain freedom or indeterminacy.

That's why nobody is losing sleep over the hoary old free will/predestination chestnut. Indeed, Islam found a work around superior to anything in Descartes or Liebniz a very long time ago.

Thalos pretends otherwise-

These worries haunt philosophers. In Beyond Good and Evil(1886), Friedrich Nietzsche observed that the way we ask important questions, like the way we answer them, responds to the needs and anxieties of the historical moment in which those questions arise for us.

A lot has changed since then. That's why the question is now deader than the Kulturkampf or the subversion of German Pietism by the neo-Prussianism of the State.

If we care about freedom more acutely than ever, perhaps it’s because we’re more and more attuned to the multitudes of ways in which our self-stewardship is undermined or hijacked for the uses and machinations of others – especially by corporations or institutions that don’t have our wellbeing at heart.

Nonsense. We care about it more because it affects our Wealth and life-chances.  Immortal souls matter if you live in a primitive age and may die at any moment if a scratch you receive turns septic. Modern medicine means our life expectancy has risen greatly. So it is worth our while to worry over our Pension fund. This means, inter alia, not wanting to be at the wrong end of a market power based information asymmetry coz Econ 101 tells us that our consumer surplus or economic rent will get confiscated. Indeed, even the top 1 percent has lost out to the top one tenth of a percent because of this sort Big Data based information asymmetry. The rest of us are even more fucked.

No doubt there are some paranoid nutters who are worried that Facebook or Amazon is filming them on the toilet and making mega bucks selling the videos on the dark web to the North Koreans.

But nutjobs we will have with us. We readily understand that people who bang on about freedom are worried they'll get done for kiddie porn or trolling Amartya Sen with rape threats or some other such sad loser type behaviour.

There is absolutely no need for us to think about 'Freedom' as something imperilled by some occult theological or sociological bogeyman.

Thalos believes differently. She writes-

positive liberty deals with what you can do to control your own life.

I want to control my own life in a particular way which reverses the ageing process. Do I or do I not have that positive liberty? Nobody knows. Maybe there is a way for the thing to be done which involves gene therapy and nano-bots. Maybe there is some arcane reason why there can't be any such thing.
I also want to control my own life such that I only meet nice people who will think my jokes are funny and not make fun of intellectual pretensions. You may know that I can't possibly have this positive liberty coz I iz a humorless cretin. However, you can't tell me this coz I will punch you.
Thus, I conclude, positive liberties are unknown and unknowable. They are not a proper subject for 'phenomenology'.

That is, you are positively free if you enjoy mastery over yourself so as to achieve your goals or ambitions.

Mastery over yourself can't help you achieve your goals or ambitions. That is why Yogis are useless. So what if you can suck back your own cum or extrude your intestines so as to wash them in a river? You can't do a thing to stop a bunch of pirates from taking over your country and fucking you over big time. Ask the Dalai Lama.

A guy can get rid of his addictions and perfect his moral character and meditate night and day. He will still be shit at STEM subjects. Meanwhile some drunken frat-boy may have accidentally released vast numbers of people from a vicious circle of ignorance and poverty by writing an app which some coke head Venture Capitalist distributes as freeware so as to strategically impact his own I.P portfolio featuring architectures created by ex-hippies during acid flashbacks.

People who don’t have the resources to control their actions, due to factors such as deprivation or addiction, don’t enjoy much positive freedom, even if nobody is restraining them.

People deprived of resources to get addicted are more in control. Addicts of certain types are, or ought to be, restrained.
Suppose Thalos has the ambition of writing something not obviously shite. What precisely is the nature of the deprivation or addiction preventing her from doing so? We don't know.  It doesn't greatly matter. We know her ambition was to be a worthless type of pedant writing worthless shite.

The matter of self-mastery crosses over into the topics of autonomy and the self.

It then has a couple of drinks before setting off once again to cross into the topic of talking stupid shite.  However, the topics of autonomy and the self turn out to be present there as well. So the matter of self-mastery has a couple of drinks and, in a morose mood, bites its own arms and legs off. 'Fuck you autonomy!' it snarls. I'm gonna cross over into the topic of Botany by becoming a plant.

An influential idea put forward by philosophers from Plato to Sigmund Freud is that the self is made up of a privileged set of the entirety of a body’s desires and motivations.

Freud was a philosopher? The guy was charging an arm and a leg for some bogus cure of an imaginary disease. The influential idea he put forward was that one could make a good living cheating silly people in this way. Plato, in the Lysis, revealed that if you are a pederast, you need to get into Paideia and set up a school. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

The modern version of this idea links the self to higher-order desires: desires about desires, such as a desire to wean oneself off a craving for caffeine or social media. A self that is successfully identified with these (literally) more elevated desires is now often said to be autonomous.

Yup. That's what people say about Gwyneth Paltrow sho' nuff.

Autonomy, then – like positive liberty – involves having one’s ‘baser’ wishes and urges well in hand.

No! Kant said Masturbation was a violation of one's own Autonomy! Please stop taking your baser urges well in hand!

We no longer believe that Masturbation is evil. Thus Autonomy does not matter any more. It is true that some academic feminists pretend that women are completely shit and thus it is important to help them assert their autonomy by flushing themselves down the toilet from time to time. However, since women pay no attention to these shitheads there's no reason for the rest of us to do so- save for shit & giggles.

I mean, shite like the following is so Seventies retro- it must be satire, right?

Freedom is not the absence of a field of (other) powers; instead, freedom shows up only against the reticulations of power impinging from without. For freedom worthy of the name must be construed as an exercise of power within an already-present field of power. Thus, liberty and causal necessity are not obverses.

Reticulations is good. Mobled Queen is good.

Freedoms do matter and it is 'regret minimizing' to devote resources to their preservation. But this means not doing stupid shit and taking legal or financial or other expert advise. Reticulations can kindly go impinge themselves.

Suppose I aspire to live in Germany after I've learnt the language and familiarized myself with its laws and institutions. I calculate it will take me ten years to be ready to make the move. If Brexit goes through, I will not have the liberty to fulfil my aspiration. Causal necessity would compel my remaining in the UK or else travelling to some other country whose laws make it possible for me to settle there.

It seems Thalos is wrong. She has not understood that the 'already-present field of power' changes in more or less predictable ways. Over and above that, there is Knightian Uncertainty which requires an 'ontologically dysphoric' type of hedging by us.

Still, expected changes in 'reticulations of power' are highly significant for 'freedom worth the name'. There has to be an active process of guarding against contingencies which reduce liberty.

This is as true for 'Judging' as it is for 'Choosing'. Why? The information set is heterogeneous, idiographically costly of access,  and has stochastic features. To defend or expand the Freedom that obtains, agents have to have diverse epistemological and decision theoretic strategies. In Economics, we might use 'regret minimizing' multiplicative update weighting algorithms along side more conventional methods. In Philosophy, similarly, existing methods of analysis may be revised or abandoned because of developments in mathematical logic. Failure to do so may cause one's Freedom to do Philosophy curtailed by the disappearance of University Faculties in which it currently occurs. Why? The subject may be laughed out of the Academy.

The wonder is that this has not already happened.

Judge for yourself.

True freedom, according to a certain view of things, is premised on a genuinely open future – not one already foreclosed by the past.

i.e. the future must not be wholly predictable. But, this has always been the case. We don't say 'Genuine cats must truly be cats, not dogs foreclosed from saying bow wow because they are actually cats.' People would think us crazy or drunk if we did. Yet this Professor gets to say something analogous because we are ready to believe that, within her field, 'a certain view of things' is premised on just such idiocy. Suppose she weren't in a worthless Department. We'd call her on such a monstrous statement. We'd say- 'who are these idiots? Name and shame the buggers.'

Be that as it may, we shall assemble evidence, not so much for the reality of future-openness, so much as for its experienced reality – for its presence in experience.

WTF? We know the future is not predictable. But we don't know its experienced reality- because it hasn't happened yet.

We shall explore the evidence for future-openness in human experience – in human phenomenology.

This is utterly foolish. The evidence for 'future-openness' is that nobody has been able to predict it. This is a historical, not a phenomenological, truth.

Perhaps there is no one who seriously denies the phenomenology.

I do. Nobody experienced the future before it happened.

But the position we shall be occupying rests on an emphasis upon a certain sort of phenomenology – the phenomenology of power differentials, power structures, and perhaps also power struggles.

This phenomenology is utter shit. That is why people interested in getting power don't bother with it.

For instance, the fact that a woman in Afghanistan today cannot imagine herself standing in – never mind aspiring to – any professional relationship to a man is palpable, indeed incontrovertible, evidence of power differentials between men and women in that part of the world.

Is Talos right? No. At the time when she uploaded this paper, Afghanistan had a female Minister of Health. There were male and female Doctors and Civil Servants who reported to her. This is a fact she could easily have verified for herself. Just Google 'Afghanistan Cabinet' and you will find female Ministers who have power over male Civil Servants.

This is not to say there are no women in Afghanistan who are not in an abject condition. But, equally, they can't 'negotiate' anything with anybody 'in the context of power differentials'. They may be able to plead, or to whimper piteously- but negotiation is off the table. This is also true of trafficked women being held as sex-slaves by Cartels operating in America. Escape may be possible. Negotiating with your pimp will get you nowhere. Phenomenology won't help you. The Police might.

Human social interactions, as we’ll discuss, are negotiated in the context of these power differentials. And we shall argue that the phenomenology of freedom is as present there, in its rawest form, as the phenomenology of power.

No! Prof. Vagina Dentata Choothopadhyaya proved in her analysis of Mahashweta Devi's 'Dopti'  that the phenomenology of power is present in its rawest form only in the phenomenology of terror. Moreover, as Dr. Daksha D'Souza Rice has remarked, the phenomenology of terror is present in its rawest form in the phenomenology of being scared shitless. Furthermore, as Patti Obaweyo Golem has repeatedly asserted, the phenomenology of being scared shitless is present in its rawest form as the phenomenology of having lots of poop in your underpants. It is a shame that distinguished academics in the West ignore the pathbreaking advances which have been made by their sisters in the Global South.

The first point to make in connection with freedom is that it doesn’t much matter whether the future is genuinely open if the agent’s conception of it isn’t.

Nonsense! The agent can delegate the task to someone with a superior conception. If I am accused of a crime, I get myself a good lawyer. I don't have a 'conception' of how to defeat the prosecution's case. My lawyer, however, may know of a legal method of getting damning evidence excluded on a technicality.

For it is not simply that there have to be options open (in some appropriate sense of that term) to the agent. It is that the agent has to be able to conceptualise open options as genuinely live for him- or herself in order to act at all in the familiar sense of that term.

Utter garbage! Hire a professional- maybe paid for through 'risk pooling' collective Insurance- and let them get on with the job.

As will become clearer as we proceed, conceptualising possibilities is not simply a matter of gathering sufficient information to render a judgement on the matter.

Why bother? We don't know Accountancy of Actuarial Science or Geology or Zoology. We just make sure they are in the loop and so our delegated decisions are optimal.

Whether an option is open or not is often simply a judgement call that an agent must make – absent evidence in the most significant cases.

The agent must not make this judgement call. She should call someone smarter than herself who in turn can find someone smarter yet. In this way, the person best qualified makes the judgment call.

Actual Judges may rely on expert witnesses of this sort. Phenomenologists may be as stupid as shit, but when arrested for murdering their wives or raping their students, they have the good sense to keep shtum and hire a shyster.

If the agent is really to be counted free, no one else can make the determination for them.

So, if you jump bail, you can get this Professor to explain to the Judge that you had made the determination that you were free and clear. Nobody else could do it for you. Phenomenology says so and cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die Phenomenology is a proper science like Physics and so just believe me already and stop pretending you have the power to put me in jail.

Therein lies freedom. But therein too lies constriction. A pinched or reduced life will remain so, unless change comes ‘from the inside’.

Very true! Workers in a sweat shop should not blame the boss for their 'pinched or reduced life'. Change must come from the inside. Be the change you want to see in the world! If you want poverty to end, change yourself from the inside into a trillionaire and buy everybody a McMansion. That's the magic of Phenomenology.

It’s a double-edged sword.

Indeed, coz if you remain poor and miserable- it's your own fault. You should have aspired more instead of whining about not having any food to eat. Sheer lack of imagination is what is causing your death by starvation.

Evidence for the phenomenology of freedom, especially in the context of clear power differentials, is undeniably diverse: from the feeling of parental or guardianly power that comes with caring for and instructing children, to that of the powerlessness of the slave in the hands of a faceless and possibly unknown master.

How is this evidence? I've cared for a kid. I saw zero evidence of any phenomenology of freedom. There may have been one or two shitheads who aspired to see such evidence after discovering their PhD on Husserl was only sufficient to get them a gig in a Montessori School. But, their aspiration was disappointed coz they got sacked for thinking cat is spelled 'Kay Ay Tee'.

Undoubtedly the character of the felt freedom/power is itself alloyed or diluted by corrosive acts of violence or mistreatment of others: from the abuses of a lowly foot soldier with a weapon, through that of a legitimate authority, to that of the selfappointed tyrant who wrests power against such authorities as may prevail, to that of the terrorist with knowledge and materials to devise a weapon of mass destruction.

This may be true of the way Thalos treats her students. However, what she describes corresponds very little to the Lebenswelt they inhabit. Why pretend people who read academic papers like this are actually child soldiers in the army of some crazed warlord?

Each of these cases presents a different experience of power.

These cases represent fantasies based on movies you have seen or atrocity stories you have read. They don't correspond to anything experiential.

Appreciation of one’s power and freedom can be experienced outside the context of choice, as it must be if the language of ‘power structures’ is at all to make sense as referring to something with an enduring, stable, non-ephemeral quality.

Why must we appreciate something useless just so some silly terminology can be said to make sense?
The sensible thing is to chose to have nothing to do with this foolish availability cascade. Indeed, statistically speaking, everybody has already done so.

Such stability is required if power relations are to condition an agent’s approach to choice episodes, and not merely to effect behaviour in the moment of choosing.

So, Thalos admits, talk of 'power relations' fucks you up. You become stupider and less able to make good choices.
The same thing happens if you listen to any other type of paranoid shite.

So, for instance, consider how it feels to contemplate the approach to your doorstep of a relative you despise because she routinely treats you with contempt.

You quickly grab your handbag and head out by the back door. Only a fool would hang around 'appreciating enduring tensions' or other such silliness.

You appreciate even now the enduring tensions between you, even though there is in the present moment no choice to be made. The tensions shape the circumstances in which you will eventually make the choices you will make.

Sensible people will have already done a runner.

They also play a role in determining the sorts of choices you will be making, and whether there are choices at all.

Only if you are an idiot.

And these tensions come apart from feelings of love and hatred. Consider how it feels to contemplate delivering a poor performance to a well-liked employer or supervisor.

We do consider these things and act in a 'regret minimizing' fashion. We don't bother with phenomenology or paranoid babble about 'power structures' unless we have a serious drug addiction.

Power relations can be relatively independent of personal feeling – though they need not be. I am seeking to draw attention to the experience of power differentials, as such, independent of their potential sources in what may, but need not be, situations of genuine conflict of interest.

This is why it is regret minimizing to make sacrifices today to safeguard freedom from interference by 'power structures' later on.

When we meet a Judge or a senior police officer we get a certain vibe off them which determines us to act in a manner which will constrain any power they- or people like them- may exercise over us.

In politics, we may prefer to elect a bumbling fool over a hatchet faced 'Vulcan', precisely for this reason.

Interests might merge or diverge in one and the same set of power relations and affiliations: for instance, you and your child might either agree or disagree over the question of the purchase of a toy weapon.

WTF? The only scenario where there could be agreement is if both are sociopaths and agree that real weapons do a better job of killing people.

 Of course we must be careful not to conflate the feeling of possibilities with their reality.

But, so far, Thalos has only mentioned possibilities remote from the experience of anyone likely to read her paper. Why was she not careful in not conflating fantasies with reality? Had she done so, she'd have had nothing to write about.

For example, one might question whether, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, any American woman is free.

One might also question whether, appearances to the contrary are actually contrary to anything. Just because a lot of shit has pooled in your pants does not mean you have shat yourself.

To be sure the life prospects of an American woman are not as narrow in scope as those of an Afghani woman.

The life prospects of a terminally ill American woman are a lot narrower than that of a healthy Afghani woman.

But the fact that even the American woman cannot conceive of herself in certain so-called ‘male roles’, as articulated by American culture, is evidence of some lack of freedom, despite what she feels when she apparently ‘chooses’ a traditionally female role.

Any given American woman, subjected to the right combination of mind altering drugs and hypnosis, can conceive herself in certain so-called 'male roles'- like being a Phenomenologist.

Now some sceptics may go too far: they may take this as evidence that none of us are free because our cultures restrict the ways we may conceive ourselves.

This is not evidence- it is stupidity. The sceptics don't go far enough. They should say none of us exist coz the Nicaraguan horcrux of the Neighbor's cat sez so and Phenomenology, whom it had beaten and enslaved, confirmed this was the case.

They propose that in fact this just is the role, or even the definition, of culture. And of course everyone is encultured, so everyone lacks freedom. But this line of argument throws the baby out with the bathwater.

What baby? The thing is a turd.

For in insisting on absence of constraints, and thereby rejecting the principle that freedom can be quite limited, it forecloses an important insight.

There's an 'important insight' in this slew of garbage?

In prescribing a menu of self-conceptions, culture can also be enabling or liberating. This is the insight we shall exploit: freedom begins with acts of self-conceptualisation. And these are often hard-won.

Culture can be nice or it can be nasty. What an amazing insight!

Why is this Professor writing such tedious drivel? The answer is that she studied a worthless subject and then made a living teaching it. However, she hasn't really drunk the Kool-Aid. In the following she appears skeptical about the whole Phenomenological project-

'The suspension of belief in the face of evidential insufficiency, which Descartes so eagerly embraced, was treated as a professional credential by phenomenologists from Husserl onwards, under the label of the epoche – the (unnatural) withholding or suspension of judgement so as to enable interrogation of the relationship between the content of an experience and real existents apparently referred to therein. Exercise of this capacity is alleged to bring illumination to aspects of the a priori structure of experience.

It wasn't till Godel & Turing & Tarski's work in the Thirties that it became obvious that phenomenology must be shite. Indeed, we might say it was Madam Wu's famous experiment which finally killed off the hope that there could be any sort of useful apriori synthetic judgment. Philosophy could have profited by this by simply calling time on failed Research Programs, or Availability Cascades, within its domain.

I suppose we could call this 'closure'. The reason we need it is so as to free up scarce resources for more utile ends. Sadly, Talos is not taking this sensible course. Why? She thinks it may compromise freedom. This is foolish. Where a threat or opportunity was imaginary and incompossible, there is no reason not to shut the thing down.

 In ordinary life we speak about a general ‘need for closure’ – a need to conclude or bring to rest a matter of some concern.

We accept closure when Science shows something we feared didn't exist.

This condition of closure is routinely construed by philosophers as generally at odds with freedom, at odds with openness, even though a preponderance of humanity (as Dostoevsky testifies) wishes to be liberated from this freedom. Whether we come to agree with Descartes or with Pascal, we must construe existential freedom – the kind we will seek to illuminate here – as something not always at odds with closure.

Why? What good would it do? Does anybody get paid mega bucks for construing existential freedom? What about construing essentialist freedom? Any job openings there? How about construing eschatological freedom? Surely that's the sort of thing for which people will pay you at the truck-stop?

Closure can be liberating. So, as we shall argue, freedom should not be construed as something that stands in opposition to closure, specifically on the topic of oneself. It was Sartre’s mistake to construe freedom as so opposed to closure on this topic. He maintained that a conceptualisation of Oneself, on the basis of a past record, for example, is never warranted because one’s future is always open, whether one recognises it or not.

That's why Sartre is still alive and is working at Walmart. He didn't let his past define him. They may have buried him in Montparnasse but he clawed his way out and became a lesbian from Lithuania. That didn't work out too well so he turned into an ace fighter pilot in the Second Gulf War. Now he's got a sweet gig in H.R.

My argument will seek to establish the following point, contra Sartre: exercise of that capacity for bringing about a certain sort of closure about oneself can be liberating. Because it can be an act of resistance against those prevailing power structures that are operating to keep one ‘down’ in some way, within an existing power hierarchy. Still, a certain amount of openness is required to enable exercises of this ‘closure’. A certain logical gap between the judgement (the proposition affirmed) and all the evidence in one’s possession bearing on it. We shall refer to exercises of ‘closure’ on the topic of oneself as opportunities for power over oneself. It is important at this point to register a disagreement with Sartre on the signs or marks of freedom – and our alignment in this regard with Merleau-Ponty instead. In regards to the space of my future possibilities, Sartre believed that I can distinguish between those possibilities within my power to realise from those in which I play no part in realising; the latter are marked by fear, and the former by anguish. Suppose that I stand at a precipice, contemplating my possibilities in relation to it. When I contemplate possibilities like stumbling on a stone in the path and falling off the edge of the precipice, that sort of contemplation inspires fear or terror; when by contrast I contemplate the possibility of freely throwing myself off the precipice, I experience anxiety instead.

So Sartre was an idiot. Most people have some degree of acrophobia. We feel anxious when near the edge of a precipice. This anxiety may turn into terror the closer we get.

What happens when we contemplate jumping off a precipice? It depends. The thing may be soothing. We comfort ourselves that 'the door is always open'. We may gain pleasure by contemplating the misery of our loved one's who very foolishly pressured us into getting a job rather than going to Grad School and studying Phenomenology.

Of course, if we have 'intrusive thoughts' or problems with impulse control, we may also feel anxious that the thing might actually happen- in which case the smart thing to do is sign up for therapy.

The latter experience Sartre termed vertigo, and suggested a clear division between the categories of fear and vertigo, suggesting it is obvious to the subject of experience which he or she is experiencing on any given occasion. These dividing lines between fear and vertigo are not so clear to the subject. The experience, as such, is ambiguous. 

It is also wholly imaginary. Sartre had no great insight into the human condition. He wrote well- some of the time- and his work enjoyed a brief vogue. But he and his generation shat the bed long ago. In '68, History reached a turning point and...turned it back on his ilk. Gaullism, by contrast, is still going strong. Sartre, by contrast, is deader than striped jerseys and berets and beat poets with bongo drums.

Whether the experience is one of genuine freedom (for example, of the ‘monstrous freedom’ available to one of throwing oneself off a precipice) depends upon other things. In my view, it depends upon whether the experience is preceded by a certain act – an act of judgement – in which one takes stock of oneself as someone who is capable of such things. In other words, it depends upon an act of what I call Self-construction. Such acts of judgement are prefigured in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the tortured soldier in Phenomenology of Perception (1962). There Merleau-Ponty says: Let us suppose that a man is tortured to make him talk. If he refuses to give the names and addresses which it is desired to extract from him, this does not arise from a solitary and unsupported decision: the man still feels himself to be with his comrades, and, being still involved in the common struggle, he is as it were incapable of talking. It is as if the man says to himself: ‘I am still a soldier in the service of my country; and my comrades depend upon me to do what I have committed’. This thought sustains the tortured man, not only physically, but in his self-conception; it is the means of maintaining his Self. For it is precisely in not allowing himself the possibility of deviating from this Self to which he has committed that he becomes free to sustain the commitments to which he clings. In establishing for himself certain boundaries, he can be free. If he should allow his Self-conception to waiver, if he should allow himself to consider other possibilities, he will – ironically – not be free to do what he earlier committed to do. This is the deep paradox of freedom, and it shall guide us in what remains of this essay.

There is no paradox here- only stupidity. The proper way to break the man is not torture- he will tell you what you want to hear and thus might confirm you in pursuing a ruinous strategy. Rather, this is a science best left to an experienced professional. In some cases narco-analysis is the way to go. In others, something more subtle is required.

People like Sartre & Merleau Ponty had shown courage as members of the French Resistance. Their politics gave them a certain salience because the French Communist Party was a significant political force. It wasn't till Mitterand took office with their help that their fundamental worthlessness was revealed. Since Marxists were ideologically committed to pretending that their murderous antics would usher Humanity into 'the realm of Freedom', there was a small amount of mileage for philosophers in talking nonsense about what is or isn't true freedom.

But that time has long past. Merleau Ponty's contribution was to give Philosopher's a way out of a useless profession into the Psychological or Cognitive Sciences. But he wasn't a smart guy. Sartre, too, was stupid- but his literary style could dazzle.

Nowadays, they don't matter. There may be some money available for an Islamic philosopher who proves that suicide bombings must go to Hell but there's none for pretending Marxist 'freedom' isn't a crock of shit. Not even the Chinese will pay for you to go tell it to Uighurs.

Power is a 'primitive notion' for Political theory and generates a useful first order language.  However, if we try to make it intensional things get very very silly very very quickly.

Consider the following-

Power over Oneself 

The power over Self, what we shall refer to here as freedom, is a power to be felt too.

One power over Self consists of biting one's arms and legs off. We shall refer to it here as freedom. It is a power to be felt...coz you'll soon feel pretty silly if your have chewed off your limbs.

But why stop there? What about the power over power over Self? Why not refer to it as meta-Freedom and assert that it consists of foreclosing the possibility that one's arms and legs have not been autonomously bitten off as part of a phenomenological process of negotiating authenticity?

Its demands we shall refer to as the demands of authenticity.

What would be the point in giving in to such demands? If I hear a voice in my head saying- 'I am your Self's power over itself. I demand you authenticate yourself by typing in your password'- I'd go straight to a psychiatrist and keep taking the pills she prescribes till the voice goes away.
Otherwise my life will turn to shit.

As with the power of argument, if we resist the demands of authenticity too often, we gradually lose the ability to feel them altogether, and eventually we fall into the life of a herd animal.

Wake up sheeple! They've put something in the water supply! You are resisting the demands of voices in your head! Buy some automatic weapons on the Dark Web and go postal already. How else can you prove you aren't a pod person?

Let’s begin our work with an example. Lisa’s story. Lisa Thompson (not her real name) is a sixth-grade student at Springfield Elementary.

So she must know Lisa Simpson. Cool.

She is of Mexican descent, from a family recently immigrated to the U.S. She speaks Spanish at home. She is poor. She is ample-portioned.

She is also imaginary.

She is routinely teased on the playground for her size and palpable failure to conform to middle-class fashion sensibilities.

Really? Is that how kids talk nowadays? 'OMG Lisa, you failure to conform to middle-class fashion sensibilities is so like not cool.'

Still, she excels in every academic subject without exception.

& also solves crimes after school while running the School Newspaper.

However, she is rarely recognized for her achievements. For example, she has consistently performed at the top of her class in math, and yet only her classmate Dan (Anglo-Saxon, male, slight) is ever recognised by their teacher for stellar accomplishments in math – accomplishments that Lisa routinely (if not invariably) exceeds.

Furthermore, Lisa dusted the Vampire King at her last school in Sunnydale and is now working on a way to prevent the Zombie Apocalypse along with her best friend Goober who is Gay but hasn't come out to his trailer trash parents and also Snowy her faithful monitor lizard.

And although she is eager to please everyone, especially her teachers, she has won the warmth and approval of only one or two.

Yes. Giles the librarian has a soft spot for her. However, he has been trapped in a Hell dimension since the Season Two finale. The other member of the faculty who is friendly to her- Miss Obaweyo who teaches Chemistry- is actually an ancient Nigerian Witch-Doctor who is secretly planning to turn Snowy the monitor lizard into a slightly smaller monitor lizard named Percy Tentacle-Smythe.

A number of the rest believe her to be a distracting ‘attention-grabber’ and routinely turn a blind eye to her bids to speak in class.

They too are minions of the evil Obaweyo.

Standard aptitude testing discloses she is likely to excel at secretarial work.

Which proves those tests are shit. Lisa would get sacked almost immediately coz she'd find accounting irregularities or blow the whistle on due diligence infractions or something else of that sort.

You don't hire a secretary who is smarter than you. Sooner or later, Corporate is going to work out that they save money by canning your sorry ass and letting her do your job for a fraction of the pay.

What does the future hold for Lisa? Can we know?

You can't because you are an idiot.

There is of course a great deal of social-scientific and educational research on just such cases as Lisa’s.

But all of it is junk coz only cretins work on it.

Suppose that the research confirms that a full 75 per cent of all such Lisas (all persons sharing her gender, test scores at age 12, social status) become clerical staff for the vast majority of their working lives – for surely the aptitude tests are correct that they can be successful there.

Which guy got rich looking at research of this sort? None. On the other hand, a lot of Corporate behemoths which based their recruitment policies on worthless shite of this sort are now bankrupt.

But surely if Lisa has genuine alternatives, all bets are just that – gambles on uncertain outcomes, whose relative uncertainty is apparently measurable by the data of the past.

All bets are bets. The thing is a tautology. It does not matter if some imaginary person has genuine alternatives or only imaginary ones.

As it happens, our Lisa, already no academic slouch, is also no fool. She can discern that her mind is better than those of most if not all of her classmates. She is increasingly engrossed in academic subjects: math, science, literature. She becomes an autodidact, by working independently through textbooks beyond the curriculum of her current academic levels. She plans to go to college. In her public high school, she takes all the reputedly difficult subjects and routinely performs at the highest levels in her grade level. In this process her skin thickens to the contempt of disapproving teachers and the ridicule of classmates: she simply doesn’t give their judgements much credit. In this process Lisa learns resistance. She prepares herself to become free, by inoculating herself to the poisons at work in her situation. Because now she has organised things so that she is prepared to conceive of herself as having live options different from those reckoned for her by other.

What would happen if Lisa does not 'prepare herself to become free'? Suppose she prepares herself to kick the ass of the SATs instead.  She would be better off, not worse off. This is because kicking the ass of the SATs is worth doing. 'Preparing yourself to be free' is worthless pi-jaw. If you have shit for brains you may have to write a College Admissions essay featuring whiney shite like that. Not if you are a topper. Then you write your own ticket even if you come from a shithole country and are as fat as fuck.

Here is how that story goes. Lisa’s dilemma. Lisa has arrived at the end of her high school career. Her academic record is stellar, her tests scores at the highest levels.

Cool! She should now only listen to people who got even higher SAT scores and got Ivy League sheepskins or made a shit ton of money.

She should not listen to a fucking 'career counsellor'. Even cretins have worked out that these guys are shite. Lisa, on the other hand, is smart. She has access to Google. She knows where her scores will get her a free ride in pre-Med or something equally paying.

Her career counsellor advises a short stint at a community college, or perhaps a small, local college.

She falls out of her chair laughing at the clown. She says 'Oi, cunt, whadju get in your SATs? Fucking moron!'

Dr T, the teacher she most admires, because he has a Ph.D., tells her that she is not independent-minded enough for university, never mind an academic life. He should know. Best to stick close to home and a modest job – maybe an elementary school teacher. (Dr T teaches her least favourite subject – history – but she works hard to do well in it anyway, for his good opinion, which she has obviously not secured.)

A teacher with a PhD in History has lower lifetime earnings than custodial staff at Public Schools. Lisa knows this coz she Googled it. She can probably also find the guys dissertation online and have a little fun correcting the spelling and grammar and gross errors of fact.

Which 18 year old gives a fuck what their teachers think of them? They know these guys are losers. Some are too polite to say so, but teachers know what they all think.

Lisa has sought the approval and encouragement of an admired person, the most eligible mentor in her orbit. But the reception she is receiving is very mixed. His judgement is ultimately negative, for reasons she can hardly fathom.

Nonsense! She knows he is a fuckwit coz his PhD is in History and the fucker is a fucking School teacher!

Suppose he said- 'Don't accept Princeton offer of a full ride. There's a combined Mandarin & A.I program jointly run by CalTech & Tsinghua which you can get onto. I guarantee you'll be head-hunted for a seven figure sum within two years.' It may not be true, but it is the sort of thing an intelligent person might say. Thus Lisa will not be able to fathom how a fucking History teacher could make any such utterance. Immediately she'd know Dr. T is none other than her old foe the Vampire King!

She is poised for free fall into the net below – into the ‘matrix of social expectations’.

Only because you imagined her as very very stupid.

But she can reject his judgement – as she has done with judgements of so many others. If only she can see through his judgement to see it for what it is – the judgement of a disappointed man, himself a failure. The capability to see through his judgement is just beyond what she is able to do.

Because you willed it so. We, by contrast, are perfectly at liberty to see Lisa humbly nodding her head. Then quick as a flash, she stabs Dr.T through the heart with a wooden stake. 'You bin Skooled, Teach!' she says as he disappears in a puff of smoke and the Credits roll.

Thalos, however, is intent on brooding over her miserabilist fiction-

Her ability to imagine his life, to consider what it might be like to be in his shoes, is beyond her.

Only because Thalos imagine Lisa is as stupid as herself.

So she cannot really know why his judgement on her comes down where it does.

He's a high school teacher- i.e. as ignorant as shit. If he had good judgment he'd have studied something worthwhile and made something of himself.

Still, she might be able to resist accepting his judgement at face value. At this time in her life that is the extent of her freedom – the extent that past exercises of freedom, in the shape of simply ignoring the disapproval of her peers, has made possible. Each small inoculation against the judgements of others has enlarged the basis of her freedom, the basis of her own power to ‘stretch’ the matrix to some extent. If she is able to take that next step, to resist his judgement in particular, subsequent vistas will open up, incrementally wider as the power of the matrix around her loosens and relaxes, in proportion to her sustained resistance to it. This proposal suggests the initially attractive idea: personal power resides in the knowledge of one’s true possibilities, and in the security of this knowledge to reject the judgements and expectations of others, as well as knowledge of the opportunity costs associated with these possibilities. Still, this idea is just a bit too simple, as we will see. By way of presaging that discussion: there really is something to what Dr T has told Lisa. The fact that she is so eager for his blessing is the very evidence – all the evidence he appeared to need. And she can see that herself. Self-knowledge is not the straightforward matter that it is often storied as being (cf. for instance Moran 2001). By the same token someone might pronounce ‘I am no law-breaker’ or, ‘I brook no corruption’, and in that way pass judgement on oneself as well as on one’s circumstances. This is so-called ‘thick’ description. And in some sense all pronouncements of this kind are groundless: they are made with a modesty of empirical evidence in their corner: ‘This is a Christian nation.’ ‘We are a chosen people.’ There has to be a certain amount of ‘room’, a certain ‘give’ in the facts on the ground, before statements like these can be uttered without tongue in cheek. Here lies freedom.

Thalos has exercised her right to write worthless shite. The Lisas of the world ignore her- but then so does everybody else. This causes Thalos to bite off her own legs. Dr. T enters the room. He says 'Prof. Thalos, you should have kept your tongue in your cheek. Instead you have bitten off your own legs. This suggests that your account of freedom-as-aspiration is fundamentally flawed.' Thalos retaliates by putting her tongue firmly in her cheek. She shows that can still bite off her arms- though this does cause her tongue to become severed and to fall out of her mouth. We can interpret her pathetic burbling as an affirmation of the fundamental value of some shite or the other. This too is a form of Power.

 Forms of Power Persons with comparatively greater command over resources exercise more of a certain power – they enjoy a larger capacity to threaten others both with force and with noncooperation.

Persons with no resources who can and will bite off your legs have an even larger capacity to threaten others.
One reason Thalos may have bitten off her own arms and legs and tongue is to assert precisely this type of power.
Anyone within rolling distance of her has a good reason to seek to placate her by any means necessary. Kicking her head in- seeing as she has no arms and legs- would get you into trouble with the Law. Jurors might not believe you acted in self defense.

These many realities get reflected in their comparative bargaining positions at any proposed bargaining table.

Particularly if Thalos is rolling around underneath it.

Persons with more resources are such as to have the means of softening opportunity costs, as well as the means of creating opportunities not yet open.

They will gladly pay Thalos to go bite someone else.

This is the power described by political theory in all its forms (Max Weber spoke of this basis of power, and it figures large in the work of much of today’s political sociology and political theory; cf. Coleman 1990).

Which nobody reads coz it is utter shite.

This is the sort of power that can be captured in descriptions of causal determinists.

Nonsense! Causal determinists haven't captured any power whatsoever. That's why President Obama did not recruit a bunch of causal determinists to go capture Osama bin Laden. He gave that job to the SEALS.

Resources are further commodified by social scientists as ‘risk’ and ‘protective’ factors.

Social scientists commodify credentials in worthless shite. Maybe Thalos means they factorize commodities in a certain way. Who can tell? She has no tongue and no arms and legs. The important thing is to keep away from any bargaining table under which she might be rolling about.

Also we should bear in mind that she can't sit on anything because she has no arms or legs. She would immediately topple over if she tried. Thus the following represents not perception but imagination.

 I am sitting on a favourite park bench. Beside me are rows of blooming flowers. I look up to see tree limbs, with birds flitting about them. Not only is the place and its inhabitants phenomenally present to me, but so too is my perspective upon the entire scene. One way to put this point is to say that only certain aspects of the objects in question – the ‘front’ parts of them, as it were – are phenomenally present to me; but this way of putting things is potentially misleading, as it suggests certain other aspects of these objects are either phenomenally not present or not phenomenally present. (But how can I intend or represent to myself some aspects of things but not others?) Another way to put the point, and certainly a more compact way, is to say that my perspective is itself phenomenally present to me: in addition to the scene itself, I am presented also with my own perspective on the scene.

Since this whole thing is imaginary, Thalos can imagine seeing the backside of everything. Indeed, given the amount of pain in which she must be she could quite legally get a prescription for something which enables her to do just that.

This perspective, as I will explain now, is a proxy of my Self.

Since it is imaginary, it could just as easily be a proxy for the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat.

My perspective is importantly salient to me.

Why? You are a cretin. You shouldn't pay any attention to your own perspective. Outsource the thing. Get someone less cretinous to help you.

My perspective integrates much of what I know, so as to help me navigate the present moment. Indeed knowledge of my perspective (however implicit) helps me ‘fill in’ aspects of the scene that I don’t have time to actually take in perceptually (to compute, in the cognitive sense). And when my perspective is challenged, it is as though my very self is.

So what? Plenty of people get out of their gourds. They rely on someone who isn't high to talk them down.

Challenges to cherished beliefs, whether about myself or not, trigger cognitive dissonance – a response that has time and again proven to be a marker of the distressed self-image or self-concept. 

Initially, when you hire a Lawyer or come under the care of a Doctor, you experience cognitive dissonance because they are telling you to do something counter-intuitive- like keep shtum when questioned or keep taking the pills though you feel better and have definitive proof that you are actually the Emperor Napoleon. However, once you understand that these guys be way smarter than you, you just do as you are told and recover your quality of life.

Suppose you go to College and are gas-lighted by stupid Phenomenologists or Feminists or guys who say you are secretly Gay and desperately want to suck them off, what should you do? Bite off anything anyone sticks in your mouth for starters. As for Phenomenologists or Feminists, baffle them with their own bullshit till they burst into tears and tell you how their Uncle molested them on their fortieth birthday.

Thus it is my perspective that marks me as present in a scene I am representing to myself, rather than any intrusions into that scene of my corporeal being – my body.

No. It is your imagination. Take the right drugs and you will discover you are absent from the scene. Or don't bother and just ignore this type of stupidity.

Interestingly, however, my perspective is not the only one to which I can be treated phenomenally.

That's interesting? What would it take for you to admit something is as boring as shit?

And appreciating this point will help us appreciate other phenomenally present aspects of things for which it is often hard to assemble or describe evidence.

So appreciating something worthless only helps us appreciate yet more worthless shite. Why bother?

In the park I spy a man in the distance. I am at liberty to speculate wildly about that man’s relationship to other objects I locate in the space whose very centre (whose ‘origin’ as the geometers say) I occupy – for now, anyway. For instance, I might speculate as to how the man in the distance manages to avoid being blown to one side by gusts of wind, as nearby objects of similar size and apparent heft are now being blown.

Obviously, they aren't of similar size or heft. D'uh.

Wild speculation might be admissible on this point only if I’ve never interacted face to face with objects of his kind. In that (strictly hypothetical) condition I might experience the whole world – indeed, space itself – as emanating from my point of view (my Self) as its centre, a Cartesian point without extension. I am a Subject – an entity with a perspective – upon a universe of Objects themselves without ‘windows’ – available for viewing from the outside, but nothing on the inside looking out. This wildly imaginative ‘take’ on the situation, this wild freedom to see possibilities, is open to me only – and ironically, as it will be my burden to argue – if my past experiences (for example with humans) is extremely limited. For let me be looked upon just once – for example by that man as he approaches my park bench. As he catches my gaze I am locked into an experience of vertigo. I am displaced from the centre of the universe, even as I experience that very centre flee from me and towards him (not me!!) as Subject.

That's why you shouldn't bite off your arms and legs. You topple over if you try to sit on a park bench. Vertigo is the least of your troubles. That guy is probably from the mental hospital come to cart you away to a padded cell.

And suddenly I become no longer Subject, but now one of many Objects – Others – in that universe I once transcended absolutely.

You made yourself into many objects by biting off your own arms and legs. But you never transcended anything. You were just plagiarising some long dead French sillyarse.

An Other in my world – an Other with a capital O – was once upon a time an object distinct from myself, bearing a spatial location to me, and bounded in space and time. Before I encountered this man, I knew Others only as objects or bodies, bounded in time and space, within my universe, I its sole Subject.

How the fuck did you know it was a man? Probably something to do with your capital O.

For, to be an Object is, as Sartre puts it, ‘to be-for-another’ rather than ‘to be-for-oneself’ – the latter is what it is to be a Subject.

Provided you then bite your legs and arms off. Otherwise, you could masturbate and thus treat yourself as an Object, not a Kantian Subject.

When I encounter that man’s gaze, I encounter myself, for the first time, as an Other, an object in another subject’s universe.

No. Shite like this only happens if you are as stupid as shit and just finished reading Kojeves lectures on the Hegelian 'Struggle for Recognition'.

I become phenomenally present to myself as an Object. This experience of ‘objectification’ is absolutely transfiguring, as Simone de Beauvoir and others were at pains to explain – contra Sartre.

That's why one must bite one's arms and legs off.

For Sartre believed – ironically, indeed perversely – that the ego is permanently able to elude objectification – that therein lies its freedom.

Which is why he didn't bite his own arms and legs off.

For Sartre, the ego is a permanent fugitive, never present even in the moment when reflecting on itself. Beauvoir thought otherwise. I agree with Beauvoir.

Very good of you I'm sure. Shame she's dead. Otherwise she could have eaten your arms and legs. Perhaps they would have agreed with her.

And I have already shown my hand: the self is present already in its phenomenal representative; it is present in the fact of its own perspective on a scene.

Like Kerouac said to Ginsburg- 'Dude, you're blowing my mind! But, that's not what I paid you for.'

Is phenomenology wholly worthless? Yes. It was overtaken by actual Science. Thus the only 'profound fact' it can discover is that it is useless.

 ‘Perspective-shifting’ is a feat ordinary (normal) human beings perform with ease – so practiced in it are we that we no longer experience ourselves as making an effort. But understanding the phenomenology folded in it will reveal a profound fact: that the capacity to appreciate the phenomenal presence of other subjects, and thereby to appreciate oneself as an Other, an object, is the ground for a phenomenal appreciation of the extents and boundaries of one’s own freedom as a social being.

There is no fact here. This is a tautology- viz 'The capacity to appreciate is the ground for appreciation'

Sartre had sought to locate freedom in the ‘transcendence of the ego’ – in the retreat of the ‘I’’s current location to higher and higher levels of removal, upon self-reflection and in episodes of objectification. (First, I reflect upon the fact that I am looking at a tree; then I reflect upon the fact that I am reflecting upon the fact that I am looking at a tree; then I reflect upon my metareflection; and so on, apparently indefinitely, and at each stage moving outside the orbit of the reflected upon.) The project of depicting the ‘I’ as effecting indefinite retreats was to be emulated some decades later by Harry Frankfurt (1971). But Sartre (and Frankfurt too, though less obviously so) misidentified the exercise of freedom. For freedom does not lie in the retreat from view – it does not lie in fugitive recession; it lies instead in the subsequent negotiations of one’s characteristics – negotiations that transpire in the decided aftermath of having been caught in amber.

So, X does not lie in Y it lies in something necessarily subsequent to Y. But this means Y is still important.
In this case Y involves doing something stupid and infeasible- viz creating a mise en abye of a pointless type.  Why devote costly cognitive resources to construct a puerile infinite regress? Why not just start negotiating? Better still, why not simply offer and accept contracts of adhesion? Only incomplete contracts need to be negotiated coz the negotiating process itself has informational and procedural value. But contract theory is stuff done by math mavens. Even they aren't as good as professional negotiators- which is why, even if they sit on the board of their Union's pension fund, they hire such people to sweat the small stuff and get better value for the members.

 Dr T teaches ancient history. He holds a Ph.D. from a nearby university. He has taught high school ever since. Lisa asks him whether he might write her a letter for her applications; she’s considering applying to the following list of colleges and universities.

This is crazy. Lisa should write the letter herself and then ask Dr. T to sign it or else. The guy suddenly realizes that she just has to tear her blouse and run out of the room in tears for him to get the sack and lose his pension and maybe wind up on the Sex Offenders list- not to mention getting his head kicked in by a bunch of Mexicans.

Not in Thalos's universe where Lisa is as stupid as shit.

He tells her that to be successful she will need, not only to apply herself, but also to develop some independence of mind. Lisa, being the sensitive soul she is, is familiar with the message, the demeaning judgement, the devaluation in it commanding an assent in an acknowledging return-gaze or a gaze-drop. But Lisa has practiced not acknowledging the judgement. She has long ago now stopped feeling the shame of being looked upon in these terms. Long ago she became inoculated to these episodes of humiliation, or perhaps she never even experienced the downgrades contained in them, absorbed as she was in her own intellectual interests. And so now she can resist the judgement, whilst accepting the label (‘woman’, ‘Mexican’, ‘fat’ – whatsoever it is) without the experience of marginalisation. And so when Lisa accepts any such label (‘woman’ or ‘Mexican’ or ‘fat’) she can do so as an act of free affiliation – as an act of personal self-affirmation or selfcreation.

Why waste time doing so before you get to College? That's where you can parlay your identity into political or institutional power. Why bother with High School when you have one foot out of the door already?

She can return a gaze that, contrary to expectation, says: label accepted, negative judgement unshared.

But all High School kids with their foot out of the door give their teachers and parents just such a look.

Someone different – and perhaps Lisa herself in an alternative world – might have experienced the power of Dr T’s efforts quite differently, felt ‘looked down’ upon, felt deprived of the ability to go forward with her plans. But not Lisa. Lisa sees the gaze, perhaps even sees the attempt to exert power over her in it, refuses the experience of being looked down upon, cognisant as she is of the ample evidence that she does not deserve it. She turns that experience of the gaze into something it was not intended on the other end: she seizes it as an opportunity for exercising power, an opportunity to make something further of herself.

This is not exercising power. Getting the fucker to sign the letter she herself wrote is what counts. Watching the terror in his eyes as he realizes you can ruin his life is just a bonus.

She can now reject this ‘independence of mind’ (whatsoever it happens to be) as valuable. Or, to the same effect, she can claim that she is indeed independent-minded, but that independence of mind is not what he and others thinks it is. She has a number of options in relation to the label ‘independence of mind’.

No. She has only one option. She needs to make the optimal choice re. which College and which Course she is going to do. Fuck independence of mind. She needs to be doing what the smart kids are doing. Okay, if she hits upon a nugget of information which is not 'common knowledge'- like a new Mandarin & A.I course jointly hosted by Caltech and Tsinghua- then she can jump that way and get a two year head start to a seat at the top table.

Sparing a thought for losers like Dr. T is a luxury she can't afford. Let somebody who failed their SAT get the fellow locked up as a pervert.

She has the power to make the label attach to a concept that favours her. She can take the upper hand of power away from Dr T in relation to that label.

No she can't. The guy is a fucking High School teacher. Her foot is out the door. They guy has no power. Make him sign your letter and forget he ever existed.

She can wield it herself but to a different effect. She can exercise the power at which humans are so good: conceptualisation. Among acts of conceptualisation, the act of stipulation is among the most explicit, and most subversive. Try to think back to the time you made your first terminological stipulation. Do you remember the feeling of exposure?

Why make any sort of stipulation? It can be used against you. It is in High School that you learn the art of 'waffle'- i.e. obfuscation. The perfect essay is the one which says nothing but appears to be erudite and incisive.

The feeling of exposure comes with the exercise of subversive power.

Subversive power is exercised by biting off one's legs and arms and then rolling around in your own filth. Why bother with anything so foolish?

Or consider what it might be like to try to convince people that there is a difference between being a vegetarian motivated by respect for animals and one motivated by health concerns; in many pockets of many societies – even in some corners of Western society – such a proposed distinction will encounter resistance, and its introduction will thus be subversive, and its maker will feel exposed.

Why the fuck would you want to do anything so silly? Suppose you want people to stop eating meat. The way to do it is to say 'Shee-yit- I just read Beyonce is totally vegan. I'll never look like her coz I do love my pork chops.'

If you say 'I don't eat meat coz of health concerns' people may pay attention if you are a star athlete. Otherwise, they kick you in the goolies and fall over themselves laughing at the consequences of a healthy life-style.

Making distinctions can be exercises of political power, and this is due entirely to the fact that when human beings act, their actions are constituted in part by the conceptions under which they undertake their actions, as well as the conceptions that they themselves create via their actions.

Making distinctions can't be the exercises of political power because when human beings act their actions are constituted by physical processes, not conceptions. Trump may spend all night making distinctions. However no political power is exercised till some physical action occurs. If that physical action is incompossible in our Universe it does not occur.

When Lisa resolves her dilemma – for instance when she resolves the matter in favour of the proposition that she is not lacking in independence of mind – she is also exercising power over her own self conception, her own identity, her own Self.

No. She is being silly and wasting her time.

But she has other alternatives too. For instance she can refuse the gaze entirely, not even notice the judgement, or at any rate pay it no mind – refusing the very experience of being ‘looked down’ upon. Furthermore she can decide to refuse from that time forward any circumstances that make gazes like it possible.

This would be very foolish. She would do well to notice judgmental gazes coz she probably tucked her skirt into her panties or forgot to throw away the decapitated head of the Vampire King or something of that sort.

These are just a few ways that episodes of social power struggle can unfold, when the entities in question have conflicted interests at stake, when there are horses of different colour in the race. In the social gaze one feels the exercise of social power at its rawest, depending upon the nature of power differentials. One there feels the power of human contact in acts of social judgement. There too one can feel the power of being drawn close, of being pushed away, of being pushed down, of being buoyed up. These can be welcome or unwelcome. They can be accepted or resisted. In all this is the negotiation of the social map – the map of alliances, oppositions and enmities. Thus an existential analysis of the social gaze can serve as a theoretical foundation for a theory of social and political resistance.

But, since that 'social and political resistance' has been shown to be entirely counterproductive, avoid the thing like the plague.

Return to Lisa’s current dilemma, what to do after high school. But those aren’t really the terms in which she is considering her options.

Only because you are a cretin and imagine her to be as cretinous as you. Lisa ought to be busy googling and posting questions on student forums and maybe even writing to the Companies she wants to intern in.

The world is changing very rapidly. Back when me and Thalos were in High School, a lot of the courses they have nowadays didn't even exist. I thought getting a job with KPMG or IBM was a good idea. I'd never heard of Microsoft.

She is instead caught upon the horns of another question, the question of whether to accept or reject her hero’s judgement – whether she is sufficiently independent-minded to go to university.

If this is a dilemma, then what does she do when a construction worker shouts out to her demanding she flash her tits?  Does she just stand there reflecting upon how her reflecting upon her own reflection is some shite or the other which enables 'negotiation'?

These are the true terms in which she is conducting her inner debate. She is deciding how to conceive of herself. Is she independent-minded enough, or is she merely the poor, fat Mexican girl fated to keep someone else’s files tidy?

No! She is the poor, fat, acne scarred, stupid as shit Mexican girl who can't even give a lewd construction worker the bird. Also, she is biting her own arms and legs off. Now she is rolling around on the street. A man approaches. She experiences vertigo because of some shite Sartre wrote when he was off his head on speed.

Yet rolling around on the pavement, she is affirming the possibility of a type of freedom which can conceputalize itself as appreciative of some shite or the other. Thus-

She is deciding who she is.

a legless, armless, Mexican lady doomed to roll around on the street for ever coz Thalos can't imagine her as having an ounce of common sense.

She is constructing her Self.

But without arms and legs coz those limbs enable us to do sensible stuff. Getting rid of them makes Phenomenology salient coz fuck else you've got to do?

Or, more to the point, she is deciding whether or not to accept the constructions of others as her own.

Indeed. Shit like that goes down all the time.  When we see a person with nice arms and legs we may decide to bite them off so as to reconstruct ourselves.

The tissues of social identity are made of such stuff.

Like Frankenstein's monster.

And they are stern enough.

Yup, that's my experience with tissues, sho' nuff. They aren't too stern or too lenient. They are stern enough- which is why they make such good receptacles for nose snot. Some of my boogers, thanks to the salutary sternness of the tissues I use, have gone onto become model citizens and fine upstanding members of the Actuarial profession.

Beauvoir was intimately acquainted with these matters.

Yup. Her dissertation was on boogers in Periclean Athens.

She describes, for instance, the phenomenology of accepting the label of ‘woman-and-not-man’ as one of being penumbral and antithetical to man: the negative, the ‘abnormal’, the deficient and therefore the ‘marked’ case within an overarching class of which ‘man’ is the central and normal. ‘Humanity is male’, she writes, ‘and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him … She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other’ 

One way of reclaiming ipseity is to bite one's arms and legs off. All the men in the vicinity will be going- 'fuck me! That dude just bit his fucking arms and legs off!'. The ghost of Simone de Boudoir appears. 'Salaud!' she shouts in her hoarse voice, 'Can't you zee zis persone is female?' The men will then lose interest and go back to governing the Universe. Still, if only for a moment, Male hegemony was challenged. This small act of subversion was like totally worth it, girl-friend. Go thou and do likewise.